Motorhome Agon

                                                  for Julie Reiser

It must sound like something is trying
to be born. At home, they were too far
from their neighbors for anyone to hear.

Their house was like the fossil of an egg.

But their walls are thinner now,
so they’re throwing things. They are
like insects trapped together under a glass.

She takes their daughter out into the desert.

The girl will remember petrified wood.
Agate rings flowed from her hands
like ripples across the surface of water.

She’ll think of the argument years later
while watching a play by Euripides.

The set is sheet metal loosely sewn
together like hides: ringing skins
that thunder like the walls of a motorhome.

Flint spearheads shatter against bronze
as Diana Rigg pounds home her lines as Medea.

Jason only taps in rebuttal.

A band of light slips across the stage
to signify a day.

                                 *

                                   But why a day?

As if any tangle of habits and Fatal threads
could be twisted smooth between
the thumb and forefinger of earth and sun.

In the calendar of shadows on the desert,
it’s been twenty-five years.
The woman and her daughter walked

until they found the woman couldn’t
take off her ring.

The daughter, who has walked out after
another argument, realizes
the ripples might have been returning.

Reversal and recognition:
catharsis comes with the discovery,
There, but for the grace of God…

She keeps walking toward the vanishing point.

                                 *

As the others go by, she wonders
at what cost they maintain the illusion–

if it shields them from what thunders,
if they fear the lack of comfort,
or if they have been exiled from Colchis, Corinth,

or Los Angeles with two young sons.

In a parking lot, she listens
for the sound inside, and wonders if
what would be born will ever,

with its own strength,

break from shadows and translucence
to fill its lungs
with the sharp and oxidizing air

where the deer outside her tent sound like soft rain.

 

Previously published in Colorado Review
and Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence Anthology